Inkjet and laser printers have become commonplace equipment in most workplace and home computing environments. Today, many printers are multi-functional assemblies capable of printing on a large array of print media such as, for example, letterhead, envelopes and labels. A recent innovation in the printing industry involves the manufacturing of print media with embedded radio frequency signatures such as is possible with a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag. These tags, sometimes called “Smart Labels”, may be used with a variety of existing printing methods and the embedded tags may be programmed with information that is of use to the user.
Such print media generally comprises a backing material (sometimes referred to as the “web”) upon which a label is applied, with a RFID tag sandwiched between the label and the backing. There may be one or more labels on the web and the sheet as presented may be part label and part plain paper. Typically, there is a desired orientation of the media to be fed through the printer that will ensure the printed image aligns as intended with the labels and/or tags on the media sheet.
In some cases, there may be more than one tag arrayed across the width of the media. In other cases, the position of a tag across the width of the media may be used to indicate when the media is mis-fed, and therefore allow the user to take some form of corrective action. For these reasons and others, it is desirable for the printing device to be able to determine the relative location of each tag on the media sheet in the horizontal direction.